_ How do you test that a feature in your application actually works? Or that it is actually being used? Usually, you’d perform lots of tests in separate environments, like a QA or Acceptance environment. Or you’d route a certain percentage of your production traffic to the new version of your site to test if and how usage of your new …

In order to release quickly and have stable application environments with minimal errors, it is of vital importance that developers work well with IT operations people and vice versa. To do this, they need to communicate well and sometimes work in the same team. Ideally, they work in the same environment. Makes sense right? This is called DevOps. DevOps is …

Azure SQL Database is one of the most used services in Microsoft Azure, and I use it a lot in my projects. It is basically SQL Server in the cloud, but fully managed and more intelligent. There is another service in Azure that is kind of similar, but not quite: Azure SQL Data Warehouse. Azure SQL Data Warehouse uses a …

If you are thinking about using Azure Functions, at some point you will be confronted with the challenge of figuring out how application logging works. Logging in Azure Functions has some unique challenges due to the stateless nature of the serverless execution model. In this article, we will cover some basics about Azure Functions and provide instruction on how to …

We are living in a golden age of programming. The language and tooling have never been better. Not a day goes by that I’m not impressed by some new programming language feature (how cool are nullable reference types in C#?); or a new technology (Live Share and Teletype are going to change the lives of remote developers); or some adaptation …

Working with containers provides a lot of benefits. They are a lot faster to spin up and shut down than virtual machines. They run everywhere, which gives you the benefit of having the exact same environment locally as in production. And because they run everywhere, you can run them in any cloud or on-premises, which prevents you from being locked …

Almost every application these days communicates over HTTP: websites, RESTful services, and even SOAP APIs all make use of Hypertext Transfer Protocol. For the most part, we don’t worry too much about what is happening at the network level when we’re building these applications. However, from time to time a problem will show up that needs us to drop to …

Microsoft Azure is a beast of a cloud platform. It’s arguably the only true competitor to AWS, even though Amazon had a 4-year head start on building their cloud. What Microsoft has created is truly impressive, and all signs point to the Azure vs. AWS debate being far from over. If you’ve decided on Azure as your cloud platform, you …

Azure Event Grid is an awesome new service in Azure, which connects applications together through event messaging. This way of working decouples application components, which enables more scalability, maintainability, and extensibility. The image below illustrates this. Orders are written in and Azure Cosmos DB database. Event Grid reacts to each new order and publishes that as an event and the …

The Microsoft Azure cloud offers a lot of services for almost every scenario that you might need. You can categorize these services into cloud computing types like IaaS, PaaS and SaaS to determine the amount of control and responsibility you have versus the time you can spend on building things that matter. Let me explain these types a bit further: …

Serverless computing is here, and I expect it to become really popular with developers over the next few years. At Stackify we are starting to take advantage of Azure Functions. As developers and a developer tool company, we know that it is still critical to monitor the performance of our application, even if it is deployed through a function-as-a-service platform …

Have you had a chance yet to play with Azure Functions? Here at Stackify, we’re pretty excited about this capability on Azure and the promise that it holds for building rapidly scale-able event-based processing with little to no management overhead! We’ve also heard from a lot of you asking when Retrace would be able to support this new serverless architecture. …

Traditional IT monitoring has revolved around monitoring the infrastructures and servers. As you move to the cloud, it is possible that you don’t have either of those things. You could deploy your app via a service like Azure App Services and rely on Azure’s hosted Redis and SQL offerings. You could literally have access to zero servers. In the cloud, …

It has never been a better time to be a developer! Thanks to cloud computing, deploying our applications is much easier than it used to be. How we deploy our apps continues to evolve thanks to cloud hosting, Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS), and now Function-as-a-Service. What is Function-as-a-Service (FaaS)? FaaS is the concept of serverless computing via serverless architectures. Software developers can …

Microsoft’s IIS web server uses a non-standard file format that is rarely seen. IIS Log Files use a space-delimited file format and also contain comments in them. The column headings are defined in the comments. In this article, we are going to take a look at how to interpret IIS log files. By the way, if you need help finding your IIS log …

Welcome to Build and our Build 2017 review of day one! You can read our review of day two here: Microsoft Build 2017 Review of Day Two – Windows News & Updates The day of course started with the normal cattle herd and a long wait to get into the keynote. Maybe it is just me, but there seems to …

ASP.NET Core is the latest version of ASP.NET. It is built from the ground up using .NET Core, the lightweight, composable new .NET Framework. Some people love it, some don’t. However, this is the future. Microsoft will move forward with .NET Core and in the future, the regular, full-fledged versions will go away. I like ASP.NET core a lot. It …

We’ve used Azure for nearly five years at Stackify; in fact, we built Retrace with Azure in mind. But is Azure the right cloud for you? The battle between Azure and AWS is heated, so we decided to see how they measure up in this head-to-head comparison. (Get a side-by-side, feature-by-feature comparison chart including Google Compute.) Customers love Amazon Web Services …

The easiest way to compare the big cloud services players is by evaluating products, services, and features in a direct comparison to determine which cloud best meets your needs. So we’ve done just that, pitting Azure, AWS, and Google Cloud against each other in this head-to-head comparison chart. (For a detailed discussion comparing Azure and AWS, check out this post.) Microsoft …

DevTest Labs is one the best – and probably least – used features on Azure. It is similar to creating virtual machines on Azure but provides some specific features and advantages we will review. Here are the following topics we are going to cover: What is Azure DevTest Labs? Test Environments Dev Machines in the Cloud What is Azure DevTest Labs? …